


Fifteen Pennies

by Banana Boy (imbetterlive)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Child Abuse, Existentiality, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-15
Updated: 2015-11-15
Packaged: 2018-05-01 17:50:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5215061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imbetterlive/pseuds/Banana%20Boy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fifteen pennies. One for each year. One for each hurt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fifteen Pennies

**Author's Note:**

> I'm writing this at two in the morning because i'm drunk and lonely and I'm sorry it's sad

Fifteen pennies.

That's how many he has now, clutched in the pocket of his jacket.

One for each year, one for each hurt.

They were always just _there_ when he was a child. They rested, sunny-bright and gleaming atop his dresser. They sat in his lunchbox on his way to school. They rested beneath his pillow and on his tongue at nights when he slept.

He'd never really noticed them. They were a constant, something never explained but always understood. The first time he touched them he was three years old.

Just a baby, fuzzy brown hair atop his head, blue blanket wrapped round his shoulders. He had a feeling his underdeveloped mind had never experienced before, something like the aftertaste of smoke, burning away at his throat. One might liken it to a sort of nostalgia.

When he put one into his mouth he tasted copper, bright copper, new copper. They never faded, always stayed shining as if they were brand new. He laid on the ground and sucked at the penny, and vaguely he could hear yelling, insults, words he was too young to understand. Skin-on-skin, crying, his eyes closing, because though he didn't know what was happening he didn't want to watch.

By the time he was eleven, he understood.

They didn't just show up. He found them. The first came when he was eight years old and walking to the corner store all by himself for the first time. Granted it was only two houses down from his front door, but it gave him a sense of maturity that kept his chest puffed out proudly.

He discovered a shiny new penny on the ground then, winking up at him in the sunlight. He picked it up, folded it into his pocket.

Ten minutes later he came upon an old man, homeless, wrapped up in thin shabby blankets. It was nearly ninety degrees outside, but the haggard creature's teeth were chattering and his lips were blue. Eren had stopped, watched, frightened but unable to tear his eyes away.

The man had reached up to him, rasped something, begged him for his jacket.

"Please," he'd said, and his voice sounded as if he'd been swallowing gravel. "Please. I'm so cold, please, have mercy, let me be warm!"

Eren hadn't done anything, and he'd watched the life drain from the man's eyes, watched his jaw go slack and his teeth go still, his hands loosening and the stained old blanket falling from his shoulders. His heart had ached heavy in his chest and he'd returned home without ever having gone into the store.

It got worse. At nine, he found a penny underneath some wet leaves during the fall time, and dusted it off, wiping it with his jacket. An hour later a car running a red light crushed his foot beneath its wheels. He'd screamed and screamed and screamed until the ambulance had come and the paramedics had administered pain medication. He'd had to use crutches for seven months. Every bone in his foot was crushed.

At ten, he stumbled across a robbery. The woman who was being robbed was crying, begging. Her skirt was hiked and her panties were around her ankles, and there was raw fear on her face that Eren hadn't seen before.

One of the men administered a blow to Eren's face so devastating that he'd laid there for an hour after they and the woman had disappeared, crying by himself into the pavement, spitting blood and two teeth onto his own chin and neck since he couldn't summon the strength to turn his head. His nose was broken, and he'd bitten through his bottom lip on impact. A teenage girl, around sixteen, had found him there on the asphalt weeping and had carried him all the way to the hospital. He never got her name, but would forever be grateful for the way she held his hand and promised he'd be okay.

At eleven, he caught on, and when he spotted that fateful penny beside the stray cats in the midst of the peak of summer, resting beside the street gutters, he tried to ignore it. He tried to walk past it. He succeeded, and when he arrived back at his home, he put his hand into his pocket for a piece of gum and discovered the penny resting there placidly among the cellophane wrappers.

His best friend had moved the week after. Eren had cried for days and days and days. He would have much preferred another punch to the face, if given the choice.

At twelve, his mother was diagnosed with cancer. He watched her waste away, watched the medication turn her into someone Eren didn't know. She screamed all the time, said things that made him cry, pushed him away from herself and ignored him when he asked her why.

At thirteen a girl humiliated him in front of everyone at school when he gathered the courage to ask her on a date. He cried, and he went home and cried some more, and he tried to smash the pennies with his father's hammer. He only succeeded in destroying his brand-new desk, shattering it to splinters on his rug. The pennies lay unharmed among the wreckage.

He never sought to explain it. There was no point. When he was fourteen he accepted that there was no way to avoid it.

He was on the train this time. It was early December, Christmas season. The sky was dark and he clutched to the pole inside of the small, claustrophobic train car, other hand stuffed into his pocket.

His palm held fourteen pennies. Fourteen. His hand was sweating, and they were slick with it. He knew his hand would smell like copper for days afterward. It didn't matter. His hands always smelled like copper.

He examined the faces around him. A woman, twenty five or thirty, asian, with dark short hair and acne scars that dotted her cheeks and jawline. Her eyes were empty. Eren felt unsettled by her, and looked away.

There was a man, a nose ring in, facial hair groomed meticulously. His girlfriend stood beside him, holding a garish yellow bag from a clothing store downtown, scrolling through her phone with the fingers that were free. Eren had a sudden craving to find out who they were, what they were, whether they were happy or not. He wished he would know. He wished he could hear every story every person had to tell, crack open everyone's skulls and chests and listen to their hearts beat and read the curves in their brains. He wanted to _know_ , he wanted to know so badly, he wanted to know everything. And yet he made no move, just stood there, pennies shifting nervously in his palm.

He'd been fifteen for almost a year. He thought maybe, maybe, this year he'd escape. This year he'd make it through without being punished for his very existence.

It was so dark out. He almost called his mother, asked her to pick him up at the train stop, but didn't. His phone was almost dead and she was at work. 

He walked home in silence. The moment the streets turned from bustling and alive to silent and deadly was pinpointed in his head. The streets were mapped out beside it, and his fingers clutched tighter around the change in his pocket. He was sweating, now, not just his hand, though he was certain the inside of his thin jacket pocket was soaked with it. A bead ran down his forehead.

He saw the penny from fifteen feet ahead. It gleamed even in the darkness of the night, and with shaking, damp fingers he reached down.

It slid into his pocket with a rustle and added to the pile already in his fist. His mind told him what his fingers already knew- two of them had slipped from his slippery grip, nestled themselves into the folds of his inner pocket. He fished them out and held all fifteen in his palm, closing his eyes.

He wasn't surprised when firm hands grabbed him from behind and yanked, but he was frightened. He was always frightened. He cried, and begged them to stop, like someone who wasn't expecting it would have. He screamed in pain when they ripped him apart from the inside, and he vomited onto the ground when he felt the warmth, the proof of their deeds marking his intestines, but spent no time recovering once they left, zipping up his pants and walking home just as briskly, though he limped.

 

At sixteen, he still held a proficient limp. The physical pain was gone, but whenever he held the fifteenth penny (he could tell them apart, could always tell by the taste they left on the back of his tongue) the ache returned. It was a phantom pain, one that he knew would not be gotten rid of easily.

At sixteen, he met a boy who spat fire in his words and never took no for an answer. Eren had been quiet, frightened his whole life, like a timid mouse too afraid to leave his meager home. Jean forced him out, and held his hand every step of the way.

Jean was his first kiss, and it was fireworks, bright and bursting behind his eyelids, the soft press of the older boy's hand to his chest setting off explosions inside of him. Jean had eyed his penny collection, and had asked for one, and Eren had given it to him. A week later he found he was no longer limping.

When he was seventeen he met an older man, handsome, rich and important. He had the smile to make a heart melt and a voice to soothe your deepest secrets out of you. Eren interned at his company. Erwin Smith, his name was. He joked and laughed and talked to Eren as if he were human and Eren, for the first time in his life, felt wanted. 

Erwin was his first fuck. The man took his virginity. They were seventeen years apart in age, yes, his years were twice Eren's, but the man was kind, gentle, guided him through every step and stopped when he needed to. It was like learning to breathe after being underwater, touching another and being touched back, feeling hot skin atop yours and hearing the breathing of another person. When they finished together, the man buried to the hilt inside of him in the silken sheets of his large house, Eren took his first breath. 

Erwin traced his fingers over the pennies Eren had held afterward, had pressed to his naked, sweaty chest, and Eren had given him one without question. That year the memory of the man outside of the corner store faded until he no longer remembered it had been there in the first place.

Levi was his first love. He was a grumpy bookstore owner. Eren studied there when he was eighteen years old, since his house was hectic and his sister's friends were loud. He sat in the corner of the small store quietly, reading, taking notes, from when school ended to when he was tapped on the shoulder, the gruff man letting him know it was time to close.

Levi was thirty-four, Eren found. Short, and loud when he had to be. One day he had sat beside Eren, pointed to the pennies laid out beside his books, and asked what they were. It had been so blunt, so unapologetic, that Eren had wasted no time in asking Levi if he wanted one. Levi gave him a strange look, but pressed his finger to one of the brightly shining coins and dragged it from the table, slipping into his own pocket. 

Eren could have sworn his nose straightened out, as if those men in that alleyway when he was only ten had never broken it at all.

He asked Levi on a date three months later. He had been so shy, timid, clasping his hands in front of his stomach, braced for rejection. Levi had said yes, and Eren took him to the movies, and even got to hold his hand.

Those years he was so preoccupied he didn't realize that he'd not seen a single penny.

Levi kissed him for the first time one night when Eren helped him clean the bookstore and had washed the floor four times at Levi's request. He had taken another penny that night, pressed into his palm by Eren. He didn't ask.

They slept together for the first time the night before Eren left for college. It was gentle, and they'd laid in each other's arms until the sun came up. Eren had breathlessly pleaded for Levi to accompany him to New York where he'd study literature, and Levi had agreed. That night he took two pennies back to his apartment while he packed.

The next eight pennies were taken over the course of a year. One when they moved in together in a sweet little apartment three blocks from Eren's college. One when Levi had gotten sick, very sick, and Eren stayed up all night with him in the hospital, holding his hand. Levi took four of them when Eren had told him about what those men had done to him when he was fifteen, and another two when Eren had whispered to him about why he kept the pennies with him everywhere.

That left one penny. Only one. Eren let it rest below his tongue when he slept in their bed with his lover, let Levi press a finger into his mouth and feel it. Levi had taken it, asked Eren to trust him, kissed him long and deep and told him he'd be okay.

The next time he saw his pennies, they weren't his pennies anymore. They were melted down, shiny but no longer holding those grooved edges he knew so well, formed to the shape of his finger. There were two of them, one smaller than the other. 

Levi had asked him to marry him that night, and slipped the ring onto his finger. With trembling hands, Eren had done the same to him. The heavy metal on his ring finger should have felt terrifying, he should have tasted ashes and blood and regret in the back of his throat but it felt as though an invisible weight had been lifted.

He wasn't frightened. He had Levi, and he had these thirteen pennies split onto their fingers that bound them together, and the other two settled with those who had taken the time to want them. To want Eren. He didn't have to be afraid anymore.

He kissed Levi, and he held their left hands together, and knew for the first time since he was three years old that everything would be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading every time you comment i feel as though my life has gained meaning i love you all


End file.
